TWO INTERRELATED DISCIPLINE

•Anthropology •Sociology
Sociology presents the self as a product of modern society. It is the science that studies the
development, structure, interaction, and collective behavior of human being.
Anthropology is the study of humanity. This broad field takes an interdisciplinary approach to looking
at human culture, both past and present.
George Herbert Mead and the Social Self
•Mead is an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist. He is regarded as one of the
founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general. Mead is well-known
for his theory of self.
•He postulated that, the self represents the sum total of people’s conscious perception of their identity
as distinct from others. Mead argued that the self like the mind is social emergent. This means that
individual selves are the products of social interaction and not logical or biological in nature.
•He claimed that the self is something which undergoes development because it is not present
instantly at birth. The self arises in the process of social experience and activity as a result of their
relations to the said process as a whole and to other individuals within that process. In other words,
one cannot experience their self alone, they need other people to experience their self.
•The social emergence of self is developed due to the three forms of inter-subjective activity, the
language, play, and the game.
proposed the stages of self formation:
1.Preparatory Stage. Mead believed that the self did not exist at birth. Instead, the self develops
over time. Its development is dependent on social interaction and social experience.
2. The Play Stage. Skills at knowing and understanding the symbols of communication is important
for this constitutes the basis of socialization. Through communication, social relationship are formed.
3. Game Stage. Here, the child is about eight or nine years of age and now does more than just role-
take. The child begins to consider several tasks and various types of relationships simultaneously.
•The self, according to Mead is not merely a passive reflection of the generalized other. The
responses of the individual to the social world are also active, it means that a person decides what
they will do in reference to the attitude of others but not mechanically determined by such attitudinal
structures.
Here, Mead identified the two phases of self:
1. The phase which reflects the attitude of the generalized other or the “me”; and
2. The phase that responds to the attitude of generalized other or the “I”.
•In Mead’s words, the “me” is the social self, and the “I” is a response to the “me”. Mead defines the
“me” as “a conventional, habitual individual and the “I” as the “novel reply” of the individual to the
generalized other.
•, Meads theory sees the self as a perspective that comes out of interactions, and he sees the
meanings of symbols, social objects, and the self as emerging from negotiated interactions.
Self as a product of modern society among other constructions Georg Simmel
• was a German sociologist, philosopher, and critic. He was intensely interested in the ways in which
modern, objective culture impacts the individual’s subjective experiences.
•In contrast to Mead, Simmel proposed that there is Something called human nature that is
innate to the individual. This human nature is intrinsic to the individual like the natural inclination to
religious impulse or the gender differences. He also added that most of our social interactions are
individual motivations.
•Simmel as a social thinker made a distinction between subjective and objective culture. The
individual or subjective culture refers to the ability to embrace, use, and feel culture.
•Objective culture is made up of elements that become separated from the individual or group’s
control and identified as separate objects.
•There are interrelated forces in modern society that tend to increase objective culture according to
Simmel. These are urbanizations, money, and the configuration of one’s social network.
•Urbanization is the process that moves people from country to city living. This result to the
concentration of population in one place brought about by industrialization. This paved way to the
organization of labor or increased division of labor, which demands specializations wherein this
creates more objective culture.
• also stressed that the consumption of products has an individuating and trivializing effect because
this enables the person to create self out of things. By consumption, an individual able to purchase
things that can easily personalized or express the self. People used commodities to create self-
concept and self-image.
•Money creates a universal value system wherein every commodity can be understood. Money also
increases individual freedom by pursuing diverse activities and by increasing the options for
selfexpression. Money also makes the individual to be less attached to the commodities because the
individual tends to understand and experience their possession less in terms of their intrinsic qualities
and more of their objective and abstract worth.
•Because of urbanization, Simmel observed that social networks also changed. Group affiliations in
urban is definitely different from rural settings wherein the relationship are strongly influenced by
family. An individual tends to seek membership to the same group which makes the family as basic
socialization structure.
• the other hand, in the modern urban settings, group membership is due to rational motivation or
membership due to freedom of choice. This characterized the secondary group which is goal and
utilitarian oriented, with a narrow range of activities, over limited time spans. As a result, it is more
likely that an individual will develop unique personalities.
Blasé attitude is an attitude of absolute boredom and lack of concern. This is the inability or limited
ability to provide emotional investment to other people.
The Self and Person in the Contemporary Anthropology
•The four subfields of anthropology – Archeology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistics, and
Cultural Anthropology, suggest that human beings are similar and different in varying ways and
tendencies.
oArcheology. Focus on the study of the past and how it may have contributed to the present ways of
how people conduct their daily lives.
Archeologists have so far discovered the unique ways in which human beings adapted to the
changes in their environment in order for them to survive.
Biological Anthropology. Focus on how the human body adapts to the different earth environments.
Among the activities of Anthropologists are identification of probable causes of diseases, physical
mutation, and death, evolution, and comparison of dead and living primates.
oLinguistic Anthropology. Focused on using language as means to discover a group’s manner of
social interaction and their worldview. Anthropologists in this field want to discover how language is
used to create and share meanings, to form ideas and concepts and to promote social change.
Furthermore, they also study how language and modes of communication changes over time.
oCultural Anthropology. Focused in knowing what makes one group’s manner of living forms an
essential part of the member’s personal and societal identity. This encompasses the principles of
Theory of Cultural Determinism which suggests that the human nature is determined by the kind of
culture he is born and grew up in. Cultural diversities are manifested in different ways and different
levels of dept.
The following are the ways in which culture may manifest itself in people:
 Symbols. These are the words, gestures, pictures or objects that have recognized or accepted
meaning in a particular culture. Example: colors have similar meaning across all cultures.
 Heroes. These are persons from the past or present who have characteristics that are important in
culture. They may be real of work of fictions. Example: Fiction – Thor, Captain America; Real – Jose
Rizal, Apolinario Mabini.
 Rituals. These are activities participated by a group of people for the fulfilment of desired
objectives and are concerned to be socially essential. Example: Wedding, fiesta, Christmas
celebration, graduation, etc.
 Values. These are considered to be the core of every culture. These are unconscious, neither
discuss or observed, and can only be inferred from the way people act and react to situations
The Self Embedded in the Culture Clifford Geertz
• Clifford Geertz was an Anthropology Professor at the University of Chicago. He studied
different cultures and explored on the conception of the self in his writings entitled, “The Impact of the
Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man” (1966) in his fieldwork at Java, Bali and Morrocco.
• The analysis of Geertz (1966) in his cultural study about the description of self in Bali is that
the Balinese person is extremely concerned not to present anything individual (distinguishing him or
her from others) in social life but to enact exclusively a culturally prescribed role or mask. In one
instance, Geertz (1973) gave an example of the stage fright that pervades persons in Bali because
they must not be publicly recognizable as individual selves and actors points precisely to the fact that
agency or an ability to act in one’s own account is an integral ability of human beings—an ability
which continually threatens the culturally established norm of nonindividuality